AERA Meeting Showcases New Ways To Present Research

In a hotel meeting room here at the annual conference of the world's
largest educational research group, four actors are putting on a play.
Garbed in black, they clutch their scripts and launch into their lines.
The standing-room-only crowd watches, enthralled.

These "actors" are researchers, and they are using this unusual
format to present real data from a qualitative study of parents'
responses to mathematics reforms at a New England high school.

Novel ways of doing and presenting research abounded last week at
the American Educational Research Association conference, which drew
12,000 scholars from around the world. Among the hundreds of sessions
scheduled during the April 19-23 gathering were talks on research led
by teachers; discussions on using autobiography, biography,
photography, and emerging video technologies as forms of research; and
presentations on "action" research, which calls on researchers to
involve themselves in the phenomenon they are studying.

"If you go back 10 or 15 years, the field was a methodological
straitjacket," said Alan H. Schoenfeld, the association's outgoing
president.

Teachers as Researchers

The proliferation of new ways to conduct and communicate research
grows in part out of dissatisfaction with old methods. Critics for
years have complained, for example, that statistical data often fail to
capture the whole story of what happens in classrooms.

"I think there's a realization that traditional educational research
isn't reaching a lot of audiences--particularly teachers," said Robert
Donmoyer, the Ohio State University researcher who brought the play
format, known as "reader's theater," to the annual meeting for the
first time in 1993.

At last week's presentation, written by Jean L. Konzal, an assistant
education professor at the College of New Jersey in Ewing, N.J., the
researcher-actors were staging a town meeting held to discuss the
introduction of new approaches to math instruction. Actors planted in
the audience portrayed parents who were either endorsing or opposing
the changes, which called for redesigning courses and placing students
in heterogeneous groups rather than grouping them by ability.

Researchers said they often use the scripts as discussion starters
in teacher education classes or with other school groups.

"I see this as an approach that speaks to practitioners and parents
very differently and gets them involved in thinking about the
complexity of issues," Ms. Konzal said. The approach, she continued,
"helps them perhaps see issues more clearly, and perhaps leads them to
take some action."

Similarly, teacher-led research, featured in several other sessions
at the conference, also has a second purpose: It's a potential tool for
professional development.

Popular in the 1940s, studies conducted by teachers later became
less common, and then re-emerged in the 1980s, said Kenneth Zeichner, a
teacher education professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Now, schools in Boston, Madison, and Oakland, Calif., among other
places, engage in the practice.

In the Madison schools, for example, more than 400 teachers have
taken part in the teacher-research program begun in that district nine
years ago.

Mr. Zeichner and his colleagues interviewed 74 of those teachers. In
findings presented last week, they noted that the teachers credited the
research process with helping them be more reflective about their own
teaching, gain a sense of control over what happens in their
classrooms, and listen more to their students.

But the university researchers have yet to document any improvements
in student achievement in the classrooms of the teacher-researchers
they studied, although the participating teachers say their students'
attitudes toward school seem to have improved.

Just as with traditional studies, newer research forms have
limitations, one being the possibility of greater bias.

The play format also leaves out discussion of the theoretical
underpinnings of the original research.

And teacher research, Mr. Zeichner said, often varies in
quality.

"There's a huge debate now on how do we decide what is good teacher
research," he said. "One problem is that the academic community doesn't
see it as knowledge production."

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